For This Louisiana Homicide Detective, Murder Is Personal

In the series premiere of Investigation Discovery’s Murder Chose Me, detective Rod Demery steels himself to interview a young boy who has just witnessed his mother’s homicide.

The Shreveport, Louisiana, officer sympathizes instantly: When Demery was 3 years old, two somber officers showed up at his grandmother’s door and told him his mother had been killed.

“As I looked at this little boy, I recognize him,” Demery narrates in an exclusive clip from the premiere on Wednesday, Feb. 15. “And I realize that the little boy is me.”

Indeed, beginning with his mother’s death, murder has defined Demery.

• Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter.

When he was in his 20s, his brother was convicted of murdering someone and sentenced to life in prison. Resolving that no family should ever be denied justice, Demery became a police officer. He was called in on 250 murder cases during his career — and solved each of the 60-plus cases on which he was the lead detective.

ID describes Murder Chose Me as “intimate first-person storytelling meets the gritty southern backdrop in Shreveport.” Each hour-long episode “brings viewers through a white-knuckle case,” with Demery as their guide.

In the premiere, Demery quickly zeroes in on two suspects. He explains that when finding a suspect, he doesn’t look for them in the streets, where they normally hang out, but rather at their mothers’ houses.

• Pick up PEOPLE’s special edition True Crime Stories: Cases That Shocked America, on sale now, for the latest on Casey Anthony, JonBenét Ramsey and more.

After a tense conversation with a suspect’s mother, Demery gets what he wants when the suspect calls him at his office soon after. But as his investigation unfolds, Demery can’t shake the feeling that he’s barking up the wrong tree.